iOS App Store to Limit Downloads by Device

[marty1980]

I was browsing the App Store the other day and decided to take a look at the Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty app. Inside the description I found a list of supported devices. The following paragraph contained the following text:

"We are working on a fix to ensure that only these devices are capable of downloading this game."

This sounds a lot like what happens on the Android market where apps only display in the market when the device is supported. Is Apple moving to this with iOS 5? Did this developer out Apple or was it wishful thinking? I don't know, but I didn't Photoshop the following image. It's a screenshot I took at the time.

I have since revisited the App Store to see the description and it has been changed and the revealing text has been removed.

I'm now very interested to know if this is an iOS 5 feature, iOS 5.x feature, iOS 6 feature or just something on the developers wish list of features.

 

[Gav2k]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

What's wrong with that?

 

[Abs_p]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

What's wrong with that?

He dint say something is wrong with that.. He is just letting us know about something new

 

[iceterminal]

This is nothing new. I've had apps that would not download to a specific iOS device in the past and gotten a message.
This would merely prevent you from buying an app for the wrong iOS device and it not work. Thus you'd want a refund, that you wouldn't get.
So by restricting it to the type of device, they'll eliminate many problems.

They're not restricting it to the number of times, just the type of device.

 

[grantsdale]

Yeah, this has always existed. For instance, you can't download GPS based apps on the first iPhone.

 

[Dwalls90]

I think there should just be low-res or lower-quality app modes for apps where the CPU/GPU are heavily used. I would hate to see the iOS market fragmented more than the iPhone/iPad already does.

 

[edk99]

I think there should just be low-res or lower-quality app modes for apps where the CPU/GPU are heavily used. I would hate to see the iOS market fragmented more than the iPhone/iPad already does.

It is not fragmented at all. All the developer is doing is specifying which device and ios version their app is for. If it is not going to work properly on an older iOS or an older device then it should not be available for download.

I certainly wouldn't want to download a camera app to my iPad one. Therefor on my iPad one I don't see Camera apps.

 

[Dwalls90]

It is not fragmented at all. All the developer is doing is specifying which device and ios version their app is for. If it is not going to work properly on an older iOS or an older device then it should not be available for download.

I certainly wouldn't want to download a camera app to my iPad one. Therefor on my iPad one I don't see Camera apps.

I agree with this where some apps are restricted on the basis of hardware, but for example, if a game runs smoothly on an iPad 2, would you want to be able to download it if didn't run barely at all on your iPad? Probably not ... but what if you really wanted that game? Then the developer should have a lower quality version available so it is usable on any hardware.

 

[diamond.g]

It is not fragmented at all. All the developer is doing is specifying which device and ios version their app is for. If it is not going to work properly on an older iOS or an older device then it should not be available for download.

I certainly wouldn't want to download a camera app to my iPad one. Therefor on my iPad one I don't see Camera apps.

Yet others deride Android for doing just that.

To be honest I was under the impression that the iOS App Store already did that (at least it does with iPad only Apps).

 

[drewc1138]

Yet others deride Android for doing just that.

To be honest I was under the impression that the iOS App Store already did that (at least it does with iPad only Apps).

I think others deride Android for doing that arbitrarily. There's a difference between not letting it run on a device because it's outdated and not letting it run on a device just because it's not supported.